efully
dressed, with a due deference to fashion, yet with a personal
qualification of the cut and color of their clothes which, if it
promised more than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest
self-respect, better than the arrogance of great social success or
worldly splendor. She could have been the only daughter of a widowed
father in moderate circumstances; or an orphan brought up by a careful
aunt, or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom she
shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat crowded, home; or
she could have been a serious student of any of the various arts and
sciences which girls study now in an independence compatible with true
beauty of behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doctor or
business man; or a painter or architect; or a professor in some college
or a minister in charge of his first parish. What struck the observer in
them and pleased him was that they seemed of that finer American average
which is the best, and, rightly seen, the most interesting phase of
civilized life yet known.

"I sometimes think," the girl resumed, in the silence of her companion,
"that I made a mistake in my origin or my early education. It's a great
disadvantage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak grammatically, as
I always do, without any trace of accent or dialect. Of course, if I had
been high-born or low-born in the olden times, somewhere or other, I
shouldn't have to be looking for a place now; or if I had been unhappily
married, or divorced, or merely separated from my husband, the
story-writers would have had some use for me. But I have tried always to
be good and nice and lady-like, and I haven't been in a short story for
ages."

"Is it so bad as that?" the young man asked, sadly.

"Quite. If I could only have had something askew in my heredity, I know
lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do anything
wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period,
because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I've
always been fairly equal to emergencies, and I don't believe that I
should fail in case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I should
be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my lot. I don't think
I'm very selfish; I would be willing to stay in town all summer if an
author wanted me, and I know I could make it interesting for his
readers. I could marry an English nobleman if it was really necessa